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Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Ed Reppert wrote:
When someone dies, how does its soul find its way to the beginning of its journey on the river of souls?

The same way a chunk of metal finds its way to a magnet, except instead of using science, it uses supernatural influences. AKA: The soul doesn't find the river, the river draws in the soul.

Cases where the soul resists the pull or gets lost are how ghosts form.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Another question about this wonderful adventure.

Spoiler:
On page 23, shouldn't it be an Athletics check to Force Open? Though I suppose the Acrobatics is to Squeeze through the resulting hole?

"He then attempts a DC 20 Acrobatics check each round to Force Open the hole in the wall so that he can clamber through and continue fighting the PCs in area B11, all the while shrieking “I seen what ye did!”"

I absolutely love it when writers provide dialogue for opponents to scream at the PCs in combat, by the way. I try to flavor combats this way myself, but often forget in the heat of the moment. When it is right there in the adventure it helps greatly.


Petitioner's description wrote:
Certainly, planes of your own design aren't represented!

You say any plane made by Create Demiplane Ritual has its own petitioner but no datas? Immortal Ambulatory's petitioner too?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Fumarole wrote:

Another question about this wonderful adventure.

** spoiler omitted **

I absolutely love it when writers provide dialogue for opponents to scream at the PCs in combat, by the way. I try to flavor combats this way myself, but often forget in the heat of the moment. When it is right there in the adventure it helps greatly.

Yup, that's a typo and it should be an Athletics check to Force Open the hole. And thank you for the kind words on other stuff that I did right too! Always easier to swallow a bitter typo pill when it's wrapped adjacent to a compliment.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Laclale♪ wrote:
Petitioner's description wrote:
Certainly, planes of your own design aren't represented!
You say any plane made by Create Demiplane Ritual has its own petitioner but no datas? Immortal Ambulatory's petitioner too?

If you create your own plane with Create Demiplane, and if there's actually a deity that ends up moving in to that plane (this is NOT the norm, and is VERY unusual), then your GM will need to come up with petitioners for that plane.

There's certainly a unique type of petitioner for the Immortal Ambulatory, but we haven't had the time or space in anything we've published to detail those yet. If you don't want to make them up on your own, then I suppose using the Untethered would be a good choice since the Immortal Ambulatory floats around inside the Astral Plane usually.


James Jacobs wrote:
Edulat wrote:
Why does Erastil send suicidal followers to hell? Isn't damning people to Avernus an act that's considered evil, especially if such acts can happen out of depression?

He doesn't. None of the deities send souls anywhere. That's Pharasma's job, and is part of the soul judgment process she does. That's also why she's neutral; she doesn't favor one fate over the other, and judges each soul on their own merits against their own lies.

Pharasma is also capable of wisdom in her decisions. If a soul of an Erastil worshiper who commits suicide from depression stands before her... she'll weigh ALL factors of that soul's life before deciding. Suicide doesn't automatically mean you're "going to hell" in Pathfinder, and if we published something like that, it was a mistake that we should fix.

It's not uncommon for an individual author to let their own personal religious and philosophical beliefs color their writing. Part of a developer's job when we devlop an author's text is to ride the line between preserving the author's voice and changing what they wrote so that the published text represents Paizo's voice in presenting Golarion. (We didn't do a particularly great job moderating Paizo's voice for the deities around the time most of us were distracted by the overwhelming task of getting the RPG off the ground, for example, such as articles that appeared on deities in the Council of Thieves or Kingmaker Adventure Paths.) If we HAVE published something that says "If you worship Erastil and commit suicide, Erastil sends your soul to hell," then please let me know so I can make sure we don't make that mistake again—there's TWO mistakes there, in fact. You don't go to hell if you kill yourself, and Pharasma's the one that sends souls to their afterlife, not any other deity.

There's a blurb about it in Kobold Quarterly #22. I always found it incredibly weird that a good deity would perform such an act, so knowing that they're not actually performing such horrid acts is relieving.

Kobold Quarterly 22 wrote:
Several religions enforce strict tenants against suicide. In many of these lawful religions—Erastil’s and Torag’s faiths, for example—suicides are denied a place in the god’s home in the afterlife, instead being condemned to Hell—specifically the plains of Avernus. Such discarded souls wander the Iron Wilderness, untouched by the pressgangs of infernal dukes that drag souls to Hell’s deeper depths. Instead, they wander in eternal hopelessness, facing endless pursuit from Avernus’s flocks of achaierai and packs of hellcats, or finding their way amid the mind-bending terrors of the Promised Land.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Edulat wrote:

There's a blurb about it in Kobold Quarterly #22. I always found it incredibly weird that a good deity would perform such an act, so knowing that they're not actually performing such horrid acts is relieving.

Oh... there ya go then. While that article was written by Wes Schneider, it's also a ten-year old article and I am 100% sure he wouldn't write it that way today.

It wasn't an article I had any input in, despite being the one who invented Erastil back in the late 80s/early 90s. It's certainly not a part of Erastil's canonical lore today in Golarion. Because, again... Erastil doesn't judge souls. That's Pharasma's job.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

What is Kobold Quarterly and is it 3rd party material?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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CorvusMask wrote:
What is Kobold Quarterly and is it 3rd party material?

Kobold Quarterly was a magazine published a decade ago by Wolfgang Baur as one of the earlier offerings from his company, Kobold Press. It was mostly conceived to be a replacement for Dragon Magazine, which had stopped doing print copies, and focused on all sorts of RPG topics.

Wolfgang's a good friend of myself and many of us at Paizo, and in those early days we did a lot of work together to help each other out. He wrote several of the earlier adventures and articles and content for Golarion (he helped flesh out Thassilon from my extensive notes in the very first volume of Pathfinder, for example), and some of us at Paizo periodically wrote articles for Kobold Quarterly to help him out in the same way.

It's all 3rd party material, and was a place for us to experiment a bit with the few Golarion-themed articles that we wrote... it was the only place we've ever done Golarion content outside of our own publications, in fact. It was a fun magazine for sure, but its last issue was published about a decade ago, so it's very much a thing of the past now, alas. Fortunately, both Paizo and Kobold Press are still going strong! Yay!

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Cool! :3 Never knew there was any 3rd party material with Golarion content in them

So both Otari and Sandpoint were inspired by your hometown, are Bunyip Club and Osprey Club also inspired by something from your hometown?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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CorvusMask wrote:

Cool! :3 Never knew there was any 3rd party material with Golarion content in them

So both Otari and Sandpoint were inspired by your hometown, are Bunyip Club and Osprey Club also inspired by something from your hometown?

It's Golarion content, but it's not "official" Golarion content, since we didn't put it through nearly as rigorous a look-over as we did our published stuff (and at that time, we weren't doing a particularly rigorous look over for our own stuff, so in retrospect I'm pretty comfortable saying that the Kobold Quarterly stuff was 100% not official, except the parts we eventually pulled into print in our books).

Both of those clubs are 100% made up, although the word Osprey is a nod to Point Arena, which does have those birds floating in the air above the ocean. They're pretty amazing; they can hover motionless in the sky, experts at simply floating still on updrafts or wind, and then when they spot a fish in the water hundreds of feet below, they shoot like a bullet down to snatch it up and fly off with it in their talons. One of my favorite birds!


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

It seems you like to use both the Dominion of the black and outer gods in different stories. I'm not familiar with a lot of the inspiration of these respective groups. Do you have any recommendations on choosing one over the other for an adventure and giving them a distinct voice beyond "they come from the dark tapestry."

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BobTheCoward wrote:
It seems you like to use both the Dominion of the black and outer gods in different stories. I'm not familiar with a lot of the inspiration of these respective groups. Do you have any recommendations on choosing one over the other for an adventure and giving them a distinct voice beyond "they come from the dark tapestry."

The Outer Gods were invented by H. P. Lovecraft across his many stories, and those creations have been influencing horror and sci-fi writers for the past 100 years. You see Lovecraft's influence showing up all over the place—sometimes blatantly, but others more thematically.

The Dominion of the Black is one of those thematic inspirations.

For me, I choose to go with Lovecraftian's actual mythos when I want to expand upon his inventions specifically, or when I want to imbue the thing I'm writing with an extra century of tradition and weight.

I choose the Dominion stuff when I want to explore things that skew a bit more "action packed" and less cosmic nihilism and doom and gloom. Not MUCH less, but a little. It's also worth noting that while the Dominion of the Black is ALWAYS associated with deep space and alien intrusions, the Lovecraft stuff is not. Lovecraftian horror can come from space, but it's also just as common to come from your backyard; horror in the mundane and the everyday is part of what made Lovecraft's stories so unique, because he didn't set them in places like ancient ruins or haunted castles in many cases. They were set in the middle of modern cities, or tied in to the notion of the Dreamlands, or came from time instead of space. Lovecraftian stories have a much wider place they can come from, thematically.

In the end, choosing between which one I want to use in a project I"m working on is just a plain old choice that I make between two similar flavors. It's the writing equivalent of choosing between a cookie or a candy bar for desert, I guess. Both are good, and both have sugar in them, but they offer different advantages that may or may not appeal at the time you want them. And sometimes you want both.


Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

What are your top five favorite Lovecraft stories?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Ed Reppert wrote:
What are your top five favorite Lovecraft stories?

In order from favorite to fifth-favorite:

1: At the Mountains of Madness
2: The Colour Out of Space
3: The Dunwich Horror
4: The Whisperer in Darkness
5: The Call of Cthulhu

Once I get to past Dunwich Horror, the next ones are tough. "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Haunter of the Dark" and "The Shadow Out of Time" and "The Outsider" all start fighting for those spots.


Reminder from Numerian Technology lover: Any magical Identification Feat needs extention to "Engineering Lore / Technology Lore", or technological counterpart, to allow usage in "Identify Technology".

Why? Because PFOA has kind of Numerian Technology.

Also, Crafter's Appraisal may allow said reminder. What do you think.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Laclale♪ wrote:

Reminder from Numerian Technology lover: Any magical Identification Feat needs extention to "Engineering Lore / Technology Lore", or technological counterpart, to allow usage in "Identify Technology".

Why? Because PFOA has kind of Numerian Technology.

Also, Crafter's Appraisal may allow said reminder. What do you think.

Yup. I wrote the Technology Guide for 1st edition, and developed the Iron Gods Adventure Path and the Numeria book. When the time comes for us to start doing Numeria stuff for 2nd edition (and that time won't be this year or next at a MINIMUM... maybe longer), we'll have more to say on the topic, but for now, feel free to use the 1st edition books as a basis for homebrewing 2nd edition versions for your game.

What we can't do is develop and create answers for content that we aren't working on, though. And as far as homebrewing stuff... I love that folks do it, but for legal reasons and time-management reasons, I don't get directly invovled in providing feedback on homebrew content.


Mr James Jacobs, I have a lore question for you that, well, delves into theoretical:

See, I had an idea for a haunted manor Halloween one-shot that involved a bunch of undead led by a Graveknight, all of whom, secretly all happened to have Good alignments due to shenanigans with a scroll of Wish and a rather creative paladin. These undead, rather than waste a chance by simply dying in this draft, would instead test the unaware heroes through combat in hopes of finding redemption by training would-be champions of Good.

With that in mind I started to include some plans for some Skeletal Champion Clerics, but then I hit upon a question: Would any Good deity be willing to support reformed undead and grant them divine spells, assuming these undead had a righteous cause? Obviously it would be very unusual circumstances, but I would like to hope that maybe someone like Ashava would entertain the notion. What is your two cents on this theory, sir? Would there be a chance, in a lore accurate Golarion, for these wayward souls to get Good deific support for their endeavour? And if so, who?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

UnorthodoxRedeemer wrote:

Mr James Jacobs, I have a lore question for you that, well, delves into theoretical:

See, I had an idea for a haunted manor Halloween one-shot that involved a bunch of undead led by a Graveknight, all of whom, secretly all happened to have Good alignments due to shenanigans with a scroll of Wish and a rather creative paladin. These undead, rather than waste a chance by simply dying in this draft, would instead test the unaware heroes through combat in hopes of finding redemption by training would-be champions of Good.

With that in mind I started to include some plans for some Skeletal Champion Clerics, but then I hit upon a question: Would any Good deity be willing to support reformed undead and grant them divine spells, assuming these undead had a righteous cause? Obviously it would be very unusual circumstances, but I would like to hope that maybe someone like Ashava would entertain the notion. What is your two cents on this theory, sir? Would there be a chance, in a lore accurate Golarion, for these wayward souls to get Good deific support for their endeavour? And if so, who?

Up to you; you're making the story up, not me. As I mentioned in a previous post, I try to avoid giving feedback on adventures and stories and homebrew rules for a combination of reasons, some of them legal, some of them time-managment based, and so on.

My advice is that if you're enjoying the plot, then go for it; have it play out how you want. If you're making it for your group, you know their interests and preferences so you know better than I do if you're making an adventure for them.


Of course. Thank you. But if I might still ask your off the top of your head opinion, who among the Core Good Deities is the least hostile to good undead, say the occasional good ghost?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

UnorthodoxRedeemer wrote:
Of course. Thank you. But if I might still ask your off the top of your head opinion, who among the Core Good Deities is the least hostile to good undead, say the occasional good ghost?

Sarenrae.


Thank you so much! :)


James Jacobs wrote:
In the end, choosing between which one I want to use in a project I"m working on is just a plain old choice that I make between two similar flavors. It's the writing equivalent of choosing between a cookie or a candy bar for desert, I guess. Both are good, and both have sugar in them, but they offer different advantages...

Do you know off the top of your head if there are any Paizo adventures that feature both the Tapestry and the Mythos?

Also, have you by chance watched any of the older fan films the HP Lovecraft Historical Society guys have done?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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RH wrote:
James Jacobs wrote:
In the end, choosing between which one I want to use in a project I"m working on is just a plain old choice that I make between two similar flavors. It's the writing equivalent of choosing between a cookie or a candy bar for desert, I guess. Both are good, and both have sugar in them, but they offer different advantages...

Do you know off the top of your head if there are any Paizo adventures that feature both the Tapestry and the Mythos?

Also, have you by chance watched any of the older fan films the HP Lovecraft Historical Society guys have done?

Remember that the "Dark Tapestry" is our fancy way of saying "deep space" without it sounding too sci-fi. The Dark Tapestry is no more an organization than, say, Golarion or Mars or the Great Barrier Reef. We've not really set any adventures IN the Dark Tapestry yet, but we've had several feature elements FROM the Dark Tapestry—usually manifesting as agents of the Dominion of the Black.

Adventrues that come to mind that have the mythos and links to the Dark Tapestry include but by no means are limited to:

Doomsday Dawn.
The Strange Aeons Adventure Path.
Valley of the Brain Collectors.
Malevolence (which just came out finally).
The Dragon's Demand.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

RH wrote:
Also, have you by chance watched any of the older fan films the HP Lovecraft Historical Society guys have done?

And this is a good example why it's best for folks to post only one question per post here. I don't mind at all if you post dozens of questions in a row. Keeping them each to their own post makes it easier for me to answer them, and lessens the chance of me getting super wordy on your first question and then not realizing you had a second question.

ANYway...

I have indeed watched them, and I wouldn't call them fan films. Indie films, yes, but they're for sure professional quality! Got to see "The Whisperer in Darkness" at a midnight screening in a theater during the Seattle International Film Festival in fact, which was the highpoint of that year's festival for me.


When someone dies who was a follower of one of the Eldest, their soul ends up in the First World where they experience a kind of weird pseudo-immortality as life in the first world is kind of like life, and death is a temporary inconvenience there. At what point in the process do they get shuttled off there? Is it at the point of judgment, or do they bypass most of the River entirely?

Do petitioners who end up in the first world then lose their memories, and do people in the diagesis ever consider things like "ending up in the Lantern King's entourage might be the least unpleasant afterlife available to me"?

Does Pharasma mind that there are people who end up in the First World thus bypassing the whole "we recycle by reinforcing the outer planes with quintessence, to counteract the erosion caused by proximity to the Maelstrom"?


James Jacobs wrote:
RH wrote:
Also, have you by chance watched any of the older fan films the HP Lovecraft Historical Society guys have done?

And this is a good example why it's best for folks to post only one question per post here. I don't mind at all if you post dozens of questions in a row. Keeping them each to their own post makes it easier for me to answer them, and lessens the chance of me getting super wordy on your first question and then not realizing you had a second question.

ANYway...

I have indeed watched them, and I wouldn't call them fan films. Indie films, yes, but they're for sure professional quality! Got to see "The Whisperer in Darkness" at a midnight screening in a theater during the Seattle International Film Festival in fact, which was the highpoint of that year's festival for me.

Ah, sorry about the 1 per! I got excited...

Whisperer in Darkness is a great adaptation (though I'm not sold on the ending...)
I was more referring to the older ones like The Statement of Randolph Carter, a student film Sean Branney, Darryl Tyler, and Andrew Leman made. Happen upon that yet? Worth a watch!

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PossibleCabbage wrote:

When someone dies who was a follower of one of the Eldest, their soul ends up in the First World where they experience a kind of weird pseudo-immortality as life in the first world is kind of like life, and death is a temporary inconvenience there. At what point in the process do they get shuttled off there? Is it at the point of judgment, or do they bypass most of the River entirely?

Do petitioners who end up in the first world then lose their memories, and do people in the diagesis ever consider things like "ending up in the Lantern King's entourage might be the least unpleasant afterlife available to me"?

Does Pharasma mind that there are people who end up in the First World thus bypassing the whole "we recycle by reinforcing the outer planes with quintessence, to counteract the erosion caused by proximity to the Maelstrom"?

There's a lot of ways that a fey can get booted out of this reincarnation cycle. Here's four possibilities that immediately come to mind to me:

1) They leave the First World and while they're not on that plane they die, whereupon their soul enters the River of Souls as normal, or...
2) They take steps to ensure that their soul will move on and break the reincarnation cycle by doing something like signing an Infernal Contract or becoming undead or so on, or...
3) The metaphysical laws of reality change, such as in some dark future where the First World is destroyed or the cycle of reincarnation gets stripped by some unforeseen world-changing event, or...
4) A deity (including but not limited to one of the Eldest), artifact, or other powerful influence steps in to divert the soul out of the First World cycle.

We have a short sidebar about petitioners who end up on the First World in the entry for petitioners in Bestiary 2, page 199. Basically, they don't actually become petitioners ever at all in the first place, but the soul is instead reincarnated as a fey, which tends to leave the creature with more fragments of their mortal lives and memories intact... not enough to remember who they once were, but enough that they feel that past life in dreams or whatever.

Pharasma doesn't mind this at all, since it's all part of the process and has been from the start, since while these souls that go to the First World take a LOT longer to eventually make their way to the outer planes, they still do the same job that all the rest more or less do. They just do so in a tighter loop contained in the larger loop.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

RH wrote:
Ah, sorry about the 1 per! I got excited...

Ha! No worries!

RH wrote:

Whisperer in Darkness is a great adaptation (though I'm not sold on the ending...)

I was more referring to the older ones like The Statement of Randolph Carter, a student film Sean Branney, Darryl Tyler, and Andrew Leman made. Happen upon that yet? Worth a watch!

I really enjoyed the ending. The first 2/3 of the movie stuck really close to the original story, but then the last 3rd not only took it in a fun new direction, but it also did so in a way that both:

1) Made it feel like a Call of Cthulhu game (which was cool, since Sandy Petersen was one of the producers), and...

2) Made it feel like an old adventure movie from the 30s, which went a LONG way toward making the movie feel like something that was actually made in the 30s.

Haven't seen the Testimony of Randolph Carter yet though.


You had previously said (I believe) that the gods have the same names everywhere and that this is important to you, so Abadar is still Abadar regardless of what continent you’re on (rather than him having an alternate Tien name, for instance). Lost Omens: The Mwangi Expanse breaks with this, offering Majagua as what the Matanji orcs revere Kazutal as. Does this reflect a shift on that stance going forward? Can we expect more cultural or regional names for the gods?

(Personally, I’m all for it!)

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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keftiu wrote:

You had previously said (I believe) that the gods have the same names everywhere and that this is important to you, so Abadar is still Abadar regardless of what continent you’re on (rather than him having an alternate Tien name, for instance). Lost Omens: The Mwangi Expanse breaks with this, offering Majagua as what the Matanji orcs revere Kazutal as. Does this reflect a shift on that stance going forward? Can we expect more cultural or regional names for the gods?

(Personally, I’m all for it!)

I'm not the only person who makes decisions about Golarion; it's a fairly collaborative effort by a lot of different folks. I do try to guide the setting and, well, "creatively direct" it, but I don't develop or write every single book. For example, your question is the first that I've heard that there's a different name for Kazutal, which seems tricky to me since we're still in the process of introducing Kazutal.

I still would prefer to keep the deity names the same in all the regions, personally, and if we do a new region where it would make sense to have new names, I'd personally prefer to invent new deities for those regions. There's pretty much no limit as to how many deities can exist in the setting.

Hopefully it doesn't confuse folks to have multiple names for the same characters.


James Jacobs wrote:
keftiu wrote:

You had previously said (I believe) that the gods have the same names everywhere and that this is important to you, so Abadar is still Abadar regardless of what continent you’re on (rather than him having an alternate Tien name, for instance). Lost Omens: The Mwangi Expanse breaks with this, offering Majagua as what the Matanji orcs revere Kazutal as. Does this reflect a shift on that stance going forward? Can we expect more cultural or regional names for the gods?

(Personally, I’m all for it!)

I'm not the only person who makes decisions about Golarion; it's a fairly collaborative effort by a lot of different folks. I do try to guide the setting and, well, "creatively direct" it, but I don't develop or write every single book. For example, your question is the first that I've heard that there's a different name for Kazutal, which seems tricky to me since we're still in the process of introducing Kazutal.

I still would prefer to keep the deity names the same in all the regions, personally, and if we do a new region where it would make sense to have new names, I'd personally prefer to invent new deities for those regions. There's pretty much no limit as to how many deities can exist in the setting.

Hopefully it doesn't confuse folks to have multiple names for the same characters.

I hope I haven’t gotten anyone in trouble - and do want it on the record that I like a multiplicity of names! We all manage with the Greco-Roman gods having two, after all :)

Thanks for the reply!

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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keftiu wrote:

I hope I haven’t gotten anyone in trouble - and do want it on the record that I like a multiplicity of names! We all manage with the Greco-Roman gods having two, after all :)

Thanks for the reply!

Ha; nope! No one's on trouble, but this is a good place for me to remind folks that Golarion is not my game. I've put a LOT of me and my homebrew into it over the past 15 years or so and I'm delighted by how many people have embraced the setting, but to a very real extent, my title of "creative director" doesn't mean the same thing it does in another company. I don't control the setting's lore; I don't personally approve or deny everything we publish, and I certainly don't create all of it. Just a tiny fraction of it these days.

So when I say something is my preference and then later that preference seems to go in a different direction... that's not someone making a mistake. That's the game growing beyond the scope of one person's influence. Which is both a scary thing (because it's unnerving to put so much of yourself into something and then have the whole of it become something else greater than you could have probably created on your own) and an exciting thing (because just like this world Golarion is big enough for all of us).

Radiant Oath

James Jacobs wrote:
Loong Laohu wrote:

Do you have any advice on how to create good character names without using a name generator?

I've got:

Female Goblin Bard
Male Goblin Alchemist (brother of the Bard above)
Human Cleric

What names could you suggest for this bunch? :)

Read lots of genre fiction for starters. That'll start filling your brain up with various character names. Read lots of RPG adventures and lore books too, since those will do the same exact thing. Don't be afraid to draw from real world names too, and just mix and match a few characters here and there to adjust things. Or spell words backwards and then do the same so that they can be pronounced. And last but certainly not least, study the language and how words are put together so that you can build new names that follow the normal rules of language without looking like you mashed a keyboard.

And then just practice, practice, practice.

That's the method I used, and I still go to name generators all the time. I also keep a page of fun sounding names in my journal so that when I need a name fast, I can go there, pick one, and then mark it as used.

That said, I'll have to pass on naming the above characters. Not only because I have nothing to go on for their names but because it's always so much better to have a name you came up with yourself for your character.

Well, James. You have inspired me. I created a kobold swashbuckler with the backstory of hearing about his ancestor "MikMek"... I look forward to using it in some online campaign. My usual method for creating character names is to use a foreign language -- but I thought I'd ask the experts as well :)

Yes, I know it's not a question -- but I thought I'd give credit where it's due. :)

Radiant Oath

Actually, now that I think of it, I do have a question.

Does Kingmaker have a 2e version (or is there a project under way to update it to 2e)? Saw a live play on Geek n Sundry YouTube channel where Erik Campbell mentioned that Kingmaker may be converted? I could have misunderstood... on the same thread, will some of the more popular APs be updated for 2e as well?

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Loong Laohu wrote:

Actually, now that I think of it, I do have a question.

Does Kingmaker have a 2e version (or is there a project under way to update it to 2e)? Saw a live play on Geek n Sundry YouTube channel where Erik Campbell mentioned that Kingmaker may be converted? I could have misunderstood... on the same thread, will some of the more popular APs be updated for 2e as well?

We're working on the 2nd edition Kingmaker and have been for coming up on two years. If all goes well in these last few months it'll be out next year.

Silver Crusade

Are any other adventure paths likely to get 2ed versions?


What is your favorite setting book for Call of Cthulhu?


Is there any information about Ugruskogg, besides being nearly as old as the planet and striking an unknown deal with Aroden for a few years of refuge aftre Earthfall? Ugruskogg is known to the Fey and can control them. But what beyond that?
What kind of Deity is it?
Why is it trapped in stone?

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Beroli wrote:
Are any other adventure paths likely to get 2ed versions?

I suppose that's probably innevitable, eventually. I just hope we manage our time and your expectations better than we did with Kingmaker.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

captain yesterday wrote:
What is your favorite setting book for Call of Cthulhu?

The baseline game is my favorite. My favorite setting expansion to the baseline game is Cthulhu Now, with the Dreamlands being a VERY close 2nd.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Deaths Adorable Apprentice wrote:

Is there any information about Ugruskogg, besides being nearly as old as the planet and striking an unknown deal with Aroden for a few years of refuge aftre Earthfall? Ugruskogg is known to the Fey and can control them. But what beyond that?

What kind of Deity is it?
Why is it trapped in stone?

This is the first I've ever heard of that word, so my guess is that there's not more information about it.

There's not much more about Ugruskogg yet I guess.


Hey James,

I've been re-reading "At the Montains of Madness" recently and stumbled upon the paintings of one Nicholas Roerich, which seem to have inspired that novella. Upon checking the paintings out, I asked myself if they also inspired the design of Xin-Shalast (with both cities being close to Leng at all). Am I on to something here?

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Krathanos wrote:

Hey James,

I've been re-reading "At the Montains of Madness" recently and stumbled upon the paintings of one Nicholas Roerich, which seem to have inspired that novella. Upon checking the paintings out, I asked myself if they also inspired the design of Xin-Shalast (with both cities being close to Leng at all). Am I on to something here?

It's my favorite Lovecraft story. There's a LOT of Lovecraft inspiration in Golarion among the parts of the setting I worked on or developed. While Thassilon is as much inspired by Clark Ashton Smith as anything, there's certainly a fair amount of Lovecraft in there as well, but Mountains of Madness isn't a direct inspiration for the city... other than the idea of there being a remote city located in a mountain range that's higher than the Himalayas I guess.

Radiant Oath

Hi James,

What went into making the Band of Bravos stream? As in, how long was the planning for the stream and what's normally the recruiting process like?

Also what's Jason drinking during the streams? I see him holding a can of something that seems to change every episode. I doubt it's anything alcoholic... :)

Silver Crusade

What’s your favourite Dragon?


I'm looking to do a video on Brevoy and in my research I found what appears to be a contradiction. Can someone please clarify?

On page 61 if Stolen Lands (book 1 of Kingmaker) it states that Myrna Rogarvia is daughter of Choral given to Nikos Surtova in marriage. On page 63 of the same book it states that Myrna is daughter of Nikos given to Choral in marriage. What is truth? Did I misunderstand something?

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Loong Laohu wrote:

Hi James,

What went into making the Band of Bravos stream? As in, how long was the planning for the stream and what's normally the recruiting process like?

Also what's Jason drinking during the streams? I see him holding a can of something that seems to change every episode. I doubt it's anything alcoholic... :)

We had a pandemic start, which sent all of us out of the office to work from home. Since our streaming studio was in the office, none of us had access to it, and all of a sudden, the regular streaming shows we had been doing were impossible. So rather than just stop streaming at all, we hit on the last minute idea of doing a few new streams with folks who could actually stream from home as a result of having the magic combo of fast reliable internet, webcameras, microphones, and a desire to be on screen suddenly and without much forethought.

The whole thing came together in the span of a few weeks, and when we started we assumed that we'd be working from home for a month or two. That didn't play out, so we kept at it until the end of the year, at the point pretty much when Patyon left the company and we decided to shift over to different solutions for streaming content in 2021.

The recruitment process was a panicked sort of "Can you do this, starting this Friday?" more or less. Payton recruited me to join the stream because I'd already been doing a Kingmaker stream with him so he knew my home setup for streaming was workable, so that could save him a little time getting me set up.

It was very much a panicked last-minute scramble, and it did have some impact on our other job responsibilities as a result. I'm glad I had the chance to do it though!

As for what Jason was drinking? You'd have to ask him, but no, it wasn't booze.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Rysky wrote:
What’s your favourite Dragon?

Are you asking about my favorite type of dragon in Pathfinder? In fantasy fiction? My favorite issue of the magazine (I feel like this is the right one because you capitalized "Dragon".)

Favorite Pathfinder Dragon: bronze dragon

Favorite Fantasy Fiction Dragon: King Ghidorah.

Favorite issue of Dragon: #55 (this was the first one I bought, so it's got nostalgia going for me, plus it had a great Erol Otus cover and a big dinosaur article)

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MKKuehne wrote:

I'm looking to do a video on Brevoy and in my research I found what appears to be a contradiction. Can someone please clarify?

On page 61 if Stolen Lands (book 1 of Kingmaker) it states that Myrna Rogarvia is daughter of Choral given to Nikos Surtova in marriage. On page 63 of the same book it states that Myrna is daughter of Nikos given to Choral in marriage. What is truth? Did I misunderstand something?

That's a source that's well over a decade old. I suggest looking at newer publications to see if we cleared up the contradiction–I don't know if we have, though.

It's pretty obviously an error we simply didn't notice during editing. And this is the first I've heard about the error, to be honest (my focus on that book was the adventure side, not the articles), and it's possible no one else has noticed.

Considering that Choral was later revealed to be a dragon, though, Myrna should be Nikos's daughter since she's not a half-dragon.

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